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Author Topic: Was America nonchalant about Amiga arcade gaming?  (Read 11809 times)

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Offline Arkhan

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Re: Was America nonchalant about Amiga arcade gaming?
« on: May 18, 2010, 04:55:32 AM »
The Amiga didn't offer much in the way of home-arcade action due to the Joystick debacle and it's price.  Compared to a Sega Genesis, NES, or Turbo Grafx in the USA.......  

Also, the audio, while great/sampled/whatever, wasn't as flexible as the genesis or turbo grafx.  Both these systems have more channels and resemble the arcade machines more than the Amiga as far as sounds go.

Graphics wise, it depends who did the art.  Moot point here.
 
You also couldn't go rent an Amiga game for the weekend, and trading with your friends wasn't as simple as tossing them your sega cart for a week.

Amiga did what it did really good though.   It was more of a PC game competitor than a console competitor if you ask me.

I prefer to compare Amiga to the IBM games of the time.  (IBM sucked at arcade games too).  games like M&M, Ultima, and all that.
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Offline Arkhan

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Re: Was America nonchalant about Amiga arcade gaming?
« Reply #1 on: May 18, 2010, 12:14:26 PM »
Quote from: marcfrick2112;559250
Arkhan, in your area, maybe you couldn't rent Amiga games, but I could..... For a brief 6 months I was actually renting Amiga games, albeit by mail order (think of the great-grandfather of NetFlix :) ) Anyway, I get a flyer in the mail advertising a by-the-week game rental place. I call and ask if they rent Amiga games.... to my suprise, they said yes. I can only remember renting Turrican3 and D/Generation...

Cool for while it lasted....


Shit that is pretty cool actually haha.
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Offline Arkhan

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Re: Was America nonchalant about Amiga arcade gaming?
« Reply #2 on: May 19, 2010, 02:35:08 PM »
Quote from: Amiga_Nut;559338
Thing is consoles have always been cheaper than computers, fact of life. Even today you wont get a PC tower for $200 able to play Gears of War in DX10 like the 360 runs it. Also console games were always expensive. Sony were the only people to make an effort by cutting 20% off the list price for their own 1st party titles. But in 1988 or whenever Genesis games here were double the price and the machine was 200 bucks. So...after 10 game purchases your Sega Megadrive here works out more expensive in the long run. I think the NES was something like 40 bucks a game here, compared to 10 bucks for a C64 game, and the unit was only about 50 bucks less. No wonder Nintendo UK failed with the NES, the games were nothing special apart from a few 1st party franchises.

Ultima VII: PC DOS game: 69.95$

etc. etc.    

PC Games that didn't suck were just as expensive as console games....

The majority of "budget" C64 games were all piles of crap, as compared to games like Castlevania, Contra (the C64 version is a travesty to all of mankind)......  the games were definitely better....

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I don't see how lending someone a couple of disks to boot up in an A500 was harder than lending someone a cartridge. It's not like a PC where you need to mess about with himem or xms/ems and config.sys etc. Pop the disk in the drive, plug joystick in, play game. Not really sure how anyone who has experience with a Amigas can make such a crazy comment.

Its simple, loaning out say 3-4 floppies to your friend opens up worlds of possibilities of problems.  "Oops, I dropped them", "oops, spilled shit on it"
"Oops saved over it", "Oops, I crunched it in my bag", etc. etc.

Cartridges, you have to be pretty stupid to damage.  Floppies, kind of flimsy.

It has nothing to do with ease-of-use.  

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Sound wise there is a radical difference between the FM chips in a Genesis/TG to the 'do whatever you like' 4 channel DACs on Amiga. Sure you get more sound channels, but it is a trade off. You wont get anything as exquisite and unique sounding with the diversity of the MOD archives compared to stuff which always sounds like the FM sounds of a Genesis.

First, there is no FM chip in the TG.    You should listen to more FM stuff.  Alot of it is pretty smooth, and often even sounds cleaner than sampled stuff.  Add in the nicely blended sound effects, and you also have a better arcade-like experience over all :).


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It just seemed that companies in the USA lost interest somewhere between the high priced A1000 launch and the revised A500 two years later. There seemed a lot of initial enthusiasm  which waned after time. I think that is down to Commodore in some ways, the A1000 probably wasn't the right machine to launch as a sole product, the A500 should have been first out the blocks for about the same price as an ST with mono monitor of $799. This would have been discounted down to about $700 or less and is not far off the 1987 price of an A500 anyway. Perhaps then interest would not have waned in the first 3 years in the USA.


What happened is, IBM took over businesses, working folks got used to them, IBM ended up in the home, DOS had some nice games.... shareware ensued, Windows happened, VGA went wild, DOOM appeared, etc. etc.


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edit :  I would be interested to see sales figures for the Sharp x68000 machine compared to NES/Megadrive sales. The x68000 is pretty much the Amiga for Japan, a computer with console quality games. So I wonder how well that high priced machine sold compared to cheap and cheerful console for 1/4 of the price.


It sold amazingly well, largely in part to the fact that it is also a computer, and as such you should compare its figures to the PC-98 or MSX instead of a video game machine.
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Offline Arkhan

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Re: Was America nonchalant about Amiga arcade gaming?
« Reply #3 on: May 20, 2010, 04:06:23 PM »
Quote from: Amiga_Nut;559678

PCs for home gaming
You mention Doom, which wasn't even an issue until the waning days of AGA in the mid 90s period, after which much of the damage to the Amiga brand through lack of chipset development for 8 years had already affected EU sales. Doom also is a 100% designed for PC thing, powerful CPU used to do everything and no custom chips, total opposite of Amiga and SNES/Sega consoles.

That's because the PC had access to a powerful CPU, and the ability to upgrade them.  

You can't really upgrade your sega's CPU.  That's why DOOM for sega 32x blew.

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You also mention VGA but a default VGA graphics option in PC arcade games certainly didn't happen until the early 90s circa 1991/92, hell even Cinemaware didn't support them before that, very few games were VGA. EGA (ie C64 look-a-like colour palette graphics) games where the PC norm for the entire 80s.

The early 90s is when Amiga started to lose its footing, isn't it? :)   No more dopey Atari DOS games with bleepblooping and crapass colors (which played perfectly fine to be honest)!   There were plenty of DOS classics.  What planet are you on here dude?

Anyway, in the 90s You'd have access to stuff like Doom, Wing Commander, Duke Nukem, World of Xeen, and Ultima VII...  and Soundblaster, Adlib? MT-32..... mmmm :D.  To think VGA wasn't part of the success of the PC would be clueless.

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You can't sell a man an A1000 if he has just spent $1500 on an EGA PC, and that's just a fact of life.

Sure you can.  Ask my Uncle.  he had 2 Amigas, and a few PCs.

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FM sounds vs 8bit DAC
You're missing the point, with the TG or Genesis soundchip (and every other computer and console of the time) you are stuck with the specific sound producing capabilities to produce your music in the style of that chip. So you have a unique 'style' of sound whether you like it or not. You can't play piano sounds on an acoustic guitar, but you can play both sounds on a Sinclavia or Fairlight sampling synthesizer of the early/mid 80s, this was the reason for utilising 4 8bit DACs as your sound chip in 1982/83 when the design was being drawn up and prototyped.

I don't think you even have a point.  You can sample on the Turbo Grafx.  6 Channels of sampled sound.  That is more than the Amiga.  The thing also has stereo panning, which makes it even better than the Amiga, right?

Someone was even batshit crazy enough to make it play MOD and XMs.  You can sample on the Genesis too.  

Though this doesn't really matter, because even a standardized sound chip when used right can produce some nice music, and when you are looking for an arcade experience, you'll find that FM/PSG more accurately recreates it, seeing as that's whats in the arcades...

Also, for the record, sampled guitars blow. I would take 32-byte PSG music over corny sampled guitars like in Menace on Amiga...

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Taking your argument even further....an Intel i7 at maximum production CPU speed sold by Intel can not replicate perfectly the sound of a C64 sound chip, it doesn't matter. You were missing the point, the Amiga had 4 channels of 'make any kind of sound you like and do whatever you want with it volume and frequency wise'. So my point was simply that the Amiga sound system only had one down side compared to say the Genesis FM chip, and that was total number of sound channels. If you actually want those kind of basic fixed waveform sounds of Genesis/TG/NES then great, but if you want to replicate some of the MOD tunes from Amiga like the Revelations slideshow demo by Cryptoburners though then forget it, unless you happen to have that 'instrument' built in on the bespoke sound chip. But you don't because you can't compete with a sampler+stack of CDs for versatility, no sound chip in the world could. That was the down side of every other machine.

All of the old sound chips are emulated good enough today that you can't really tell the difference.  If you say you can, I say you're lying and being a spaz.

Like I said, sampling is able to be done on the TG and the Genesis, rendering alot of this argument useless.

Not to mention, another nice little thing is the Turbo Grafx CD, and the Sega CD.   No amount of "make it sound like you want" sampling setup can cope with redbook audio.  ;)

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Rental feasibility, Cart vs 3.5" floppy I doubt you would snap a 3.5" disk in half by accident, and it's not going to get damaged by accident. To be honest 3.5" floppy disks are very sturdy as a piece of plastic design unlike 5.25" disks like on the x68000, certainly sturdy enough to be dropped from standing up height sure. And dropping a disk in a mug of water/soup is no less a problem than dropping a cart in it. So magnetic destruction is the only real issue and even leaving disks on PSUs and large hifi speakers I have never lost a disk like that, only had bad disks if I bought unbranded crap disks for peanuts.

Christ you are dense.  I can take a 3.5" floppy and crack it to pieces with one hand.   Try doing that to a sega game.  Not gonna work unless you're Lou Ferrigno.

And, you can get cartridges wet and they still work.  as long as you let them dry out and they don't corrode, you're fine.  Disks, not so much.

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Virus? Simple, remove the write enable tab from the disks leaving them permanently wite protected, it's not like there were any arcade games that wrote back to the disk as a requirement and it's no different technically to the tab being broken on rental tapes to stop dumdums recording over a film with the superbowl!

Simple he says!  You act like virus-spreaders are braindead and not crafty at all.

Hell I wouldn't be surprised if someone somewhere dismantled a floppy disk, put a new one in place that loaded up some porno on your Amiga, and then re assembled it and sold it to some little kid.


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I suspect the reason blockbusters didn't rent Amiga games was due to a smaller market, and possibly as they would need to get an individual legal agreement with every single software company that sold Amiga games they wanted to rent out. It's not as simple as when they just did a single deal with Sega and Nintendo.

I suspect it is because giving floppies out to the general public and expecting them to come back in 1 piece every time is mental.   You never know a floppy game is borked til you try to load the borked part.

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And usability certainly isn't the issue, if you are too stupid to pop 'Disk 1' in your A500, out of a maximum of 2 or 3 on average for Amiga arcade games, and flick the switch on the PSU you then evolution dictates you shouldn't even be allowed to procreate! We are not talking about epic arcade point and click adventures from Lucas Arts on 12 disks here!

Why arent we talking about them?  Do you think rental places only rent out durpy arcade games? :)  

Useability is an issue.  For one, what if the game requires something that you are unsure if your Amiga has?  What if your parents aren't computer experts and you're like, 10.  

It's easier to go "MMM SONIC" and grab it off the shelf and go home, knowing it will work in your Sega.  a genesis is a genesis.  They are all the same.   No chip ram expansions, or crap like that.

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Off-topic personal opinions about game comparisons
For every NES game you show that is worse as a C64 conversion I can show you 1 of superior conversion. If you are a Mario fanboy then you have to own a Nintendo. How many games did NES have? 750? That's between 5-10% of the C64/Amiga catalogue.


Do it.  I can't wait to see what biased nonsense occurs. :)  Are you going to tell me the Salamander for C64 is better?  That will be funny.

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Anyway we are talking about Amiga, NOT C64 games, which were 6x cheaper than the tiny and repetitive catalogue of the NES.

Then why are we talking about NES?  It holds nothing to the Amiga. Duh.

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Genesis struggled to produce a superior version of Lotus challenge II compared to Amiga BUT Lotus II on Genesis is not really that different in speed and quality of animation to Genesis version of Outrun, so you can't go crying about one game being badly coded. So therefore clearly the Amiga version of Outrun should have been pretty damned close to the Genesis version which is really nice rather than that steaming turd US Gold produced.

Lotus Challenge 2 sucks, so its ok.

and, the rest of that quote makes no sense.  It's too full of attempted higher English. So, thus, therefore clearly rather I got bored reading it. :roflmao:

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was designed around PC architecture, just like Shadow of the Beast was designed around the Amiga OCS chipset. Both games only work well on the intended target machine, but this is 100% off topic and not really relevant to the discussion anyway.


The PCE CD version of Shadow of the Beast plays and sounds better than the Amiga one.

Just sayin.
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Offline Arkhan

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Re: Was America nonchalant about Amiga arcade gaming?
« Reply #4 on: May 20, 2010, 05:51:27 PM »
Quote from: runequester;559762
I am hoping we can get the hell rid of cd's soon. I hate the damn things


whats wrong with them?
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Offline Arkhan

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Re: Was America nonchalant about Amiga arcade gaming?
« Reply #5 on: May 20, 2010, 07:46:29 PM »
That would be interesting if consoles started being run off USB sticks. one for each game.

though, CD's if properly taken care of, last forever, store rather nicely, and, I think they are still cheaper to produce than even USB sticks and stuff right now.
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Offline Arkhan

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Re: Was America nonchalant about Amiga arcade gaming?
« Reply #6 on: May 21, 2010, 12:22:02 AM »
Quote from: Amiga_Nut;559798
3. PC-Engine/Turbografix CD SotB has a CD soundtrack, so that is nothing to do with internal sound hardware. And amazingly it still sounds worse than David Whittaker's finest.
You are high and being a biased amigatard.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FH1hTSwHirc

I think Whitaker would have killed for the possibilities of the percussion in that version.  The rest of the soundtrack doesn't disappoint either.

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4. The TG/PC-E has 6 channel 5 bit wavetable unit with an effective lock of around 7khz for those 5 bit samples to playback during your average game being executed. I've heard the XM player on PC-E and it sounds worse compared to Octamed 8 software channel MOD playback mode. I've also got SF2 for PC-E and the samples are scratchy.
Yeah uh you don't need to lecture me on PCE hardware.  Kinda published a game for it and wrote two different sound engines, lol.  Quoting hardware specs doesn't mean you actually know what you are saying you know.

When did you hear the XM player?  It is fairly recent, and changing constantly.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PILAjbkItJw

Sounds pretty good to me

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5. And by comparison Sega Genesis has two sound chips, one is a 70s Texas Instruments TI99/4A computer's soundchip from SMS. Second one a 6 channel FM YM2162 chip from Yamaha, which can be configured for 5 channel FM + 1 rough 8-bit sample channel.
Thats nice, glad you can quote wikipedia specs, what is your point.

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TurboGrafx 5 bit 6 channel sound is about as rough as a C64. And if you want to make a song that sounds like it's on a YM2162 then Genesis is the one. If you want to have those pan pipes from Amiga SotB as an instrument then I guess you are screwed. So like I said, sample playback instead of being limited to artificial waveforms generated by oscillators is good, Amiga being stuck at 4 channels from 85 to 95 very bad. As my original comment was the only limitation was 4 sound channels for the life of Amiga.....
You want those pan pipes on the TG? Sample them. derurhrhrh.   Splatterhouse samples in a friggin pipe organ.

Saying the PCE is as rough as the SID is mental.  
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvc0HYg0CZE

Much smoother and arcade like.  No blaring disastrous SFX overtaking the music.  No omission of SFX.  

Sampling is not always better.  Alot of the time it makes the games sound corny.  R-Type on the Amiga sounds stupid.  The music is done better on the MSX w/ a 3 channel PSG.  and the SFX don't blare out over the poorly attempted music.

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pick up your glasses before replying to my posts again ;)
Sorry. I lose interest about halfway through reading your master theses every time, especially since they are worded goony half the time.


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6. Doom was released in the middle of December 1993 so 1994 onwards, show me 10 arcade games from 1985-1990ish that were superior to either the Genesis or an Amiga. I remember going through arcade conversions on Home of the Underdogs by year and 1991 was about the time these types of games were ALL in VGA not EGA.
Nah.  I asked you to do the same for C64/NES and you didn't (read: couldn't).   Go look at HotU again.  There are plenty of good action/arcade games for DOS that are comparable to the Genesis, etc.


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There were plenty of classic DOS games like adventures/strategy and RPGs etc, can't really think of a single arcade conversion worth a crap on DOS before around mid 90s at best.
That's because you are a biased flid.

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7. Clearly you can do Doom on a 68000, the Atari Jaguar console proves this with just a DSP,blitter and a 13mhz 68000. There were rumours that Commodore would stick a DSP in the A1200, it was supposed to be a massive upgrade to Agnus and it had an 020 @ 14mhz. So clearly if AGA wasn't too little too late Doom was quite possible regardless of CPU speed. Which again was my original point, plus the fact it came out when Amiga was more or less screwed anyway after 9 years of minimal development.
Doesn't matter if it CAN do DOOM, it matters if it DID do DOOM.   Ever read up on the DOOM phenomenon that took place in workplaces etc?  Really good stuff.

Also the Amiga Doom when it finally came out, didnt even have the right music.  What is it with Amiga games and changing the entire soundtrack?  

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7. Spending $3000 on a PC to play arcade games is a bit dumb. A Roland MT32 was about 350 bucks here, so basically you are spending more on a general midi sound module than an A1200? Yeah kind of stupid and not the actions of people making up a mass market.
If all you do with a PC is play games, it is dumb.  But if that is all you bought a computer for, you probably are dumb.  Smart people by the computer to do alot of things besides fiddle with games all day.  PCs were work machines too.  

Who said you had to have an MT-32?  Sound Blaster did just fine.  The MT-32 was nice for people who already had it for music making.  It's always nice to have the option to hook your games up to your instruments.

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Breaking off the metal slider doesn't kill a disk, and if you aren't ham fisted you can put it back on...say from another blank that cost 10p.
Little kids are typically hamfisted.  

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All I said was in normal conditions...if you are going to drop them out of your bedroom window/run them over with a monster truck/leave them in a glass jar facing the sun for a week yada yada then you are a moron. The point is I never had a problem with floppy disks in general, if you treat stuff with a modicum of respect and don't act like an idiot then disks are sturdy enough for their purpose.
Little kids often don't know any better, and they were/are the backbone of the rental market.

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Drop it now and get back on bloody topic. Rental market had nothing to do with USA not doing any home grown coin-op conversions, the issue at hand.
How do you know? Maybe it did.

Also, why do you get to decide when to get back on topic? :)  You're the one typing 38 page off topic replies.
« Last Edit: May 21, 2010, 12:28:02 AM by Arkhan »
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